“Where do you feel it?” I prodded.
“All over,” he said, eyes empty and banal as sunlight—“Like hair sprouting all over me”—He squirmed and giggled and creamed in his dry goods—
“And after every job I get to see the movies—You know—” And he gave me the sign twisting his head to the left and up—
So I gave him the sign back and the words jumped in my throat all there like and ready the way they always do when I’m right. “You make the pilgrimage?”
“Yes—The road to Rome.”
I withdrew the antibiotics and left him there with that dreamy little-boy look twisting the napkin into a hangman’s knot—On the bus from the air terminal a thin grey man sat down beside me—I offered him a cigarette and he said “Have one of mine,” and I see he is throwing the tin on me—“Nova police—You are Mr. Snide I believe.” And he moved right in and shook me down looking at pictures, reading letters checking back on my time track.
“There’s one of them,” I heard some one say as he looked at a photo in my files.
“Hummm—yes—and here’s another—Thank you Mr. Snide—You have been most cooperative—”
I stopped off in Bologna to look up my old friend Green Tony thinking he could probably give me a line—up four flights in a tenement past the old bitch selling black-market cigarettes and cocaine cut with Saniflush, through a dirty brown curtain and there is Green Tony in a pad with Chinese jade all over and Etruscan cuspidors—He is sitting back with his leg thrown over an Egyptian throne smoking a cigarette in a carved emerald holder—He doesn’t get up but he says: “Dick Tracy in the flesh,” and motions to a Babylonian couch.
I told him what I was after and his face went a bright green with rage. “That stupid bitch—She bringa the heat on all of us—Nova heat—” He blew a cloud of smoke and it hung there solid in front of him—Then he wrote an address in the smoke—“No. 88 Via di Nile, Roma.”
This 88 Nile turned out to be one of those bar-soda fountains like they have in Rome—You are subject to find a maraschino cherry in your dry martini and right next to some citizen is sucking a banana split disgust you to see it—Well I am sitting there trying not to see it so I look down at the far end of the counter and dug a boy very dark with kinky hair and I give him the sign—And he gives it right back—So I spit the maraschino cherry in the bartender’s face and slip him a big tip and he says “Rivideci and bigger.”
And I say “Up yours with a double strawberry phosphate.”
The boy finishes his Pink Lady and follows me out and I take him back to my trap and right away get into an argument with the clerk about no visitors stranezza to the hotel—Enough garlic on his breath to deter a covey of vampires—I shove a handful of lire into his mouth “Go buy yourself some more gold teeth,” I told him—
When this boy peeled off the dry goods he gives off a slow stink like a thawing mummy—But his asshole sucked me right in, all my experience as a Private Eye never felt anything like it—In the flash bulb of orgasm I see that fucking clerk has stuck his head through the transom for a refill—Well expense account—The boy is lying there on the bed spreading out like a jelly slow tremors running through it and sighs and says: “Almost like the real thing isn’t it?”
And I said “I need the time milking,” and give him the sign so heavy come near slipping a disk.
“I can see you’re one of our own,” he said warmly sucking himself back into shape—“Dinner at eight”—He comes back at eight in a souped up Ragazzi and we take off 160 per and scream to stop in front of a villa I can see the Bentleys and Hispano Bear Cats and Stutz Suisses and what not piled up and all the golden youth of Europe is disembarking—“Leave your clothes in the vestibule,” the butler tells us and we walk in on a room full of people all naked to a turn sitting around on silk stools and a bar with a pink shell behind it—This cunt undulates forward and give me the sign and holds out her hand “I am the Contessa di Vile your hostess for tonight”—She points to the boys at the bar with her cigarette holder and their cocks jumped up one after the other—And I did the polite thing too when my turn came—
So all the boys began chanting in unison “ The movies!—The movies!—We want the movies!—” So she led the way into the projection room which was filled with pink light seeping through the walls and floor and ceiling—The boy was explaining to me that these were actual films taken during the Abyssinian War and how lucky I was to be there—Then the action starts—There on the screen is a gallows and some young soldiers standing around with prisoners in loincloths—The soldiers are dragging this kid up onto the gallows and he is biting and screaming and shitting himself and his loincloth slips off and they shove him under the noose and one of them tightens it around his neck standing there now mother naked—Then the trap fell and he drops kicking and yelping and you could hear his neck snap like a stick in a wet towel—He hangs there pulling his knees up to the chest and pumping out spurts of jissom and the audience coming right with him spurt for spurt—So the soldiers strip the loincloths off the others and they all got hard-ons waiting and watching—Got through a hundred of them more or less one at a time—Then they run the movie in slow motion slower and slower and you are coming slower and slower until it took an hour and then two hours and finally all the boys are standing there like statues getting their rocks off geologic—Meanwhile an angle comes dripping down and forms a stalactite in my brain and I slip back to the projection room and speed up the movie so the hanged boys are coming like machine guns—Half the guests explode straightaway from altered pressure chunks of limestone whistling through the air. The others are flopping around on the floor like beached idiots and the Contessa gasps out “Carbon dioxide for the love of Kali”—So somebody turned on the carbon dioxide tanks and I made it out of there in an aqualung—Next thing the nova heat moves in and bust the whole aquarium.
“Humm, yes, and there’s another planet—”
The officer moved back dissolving most cooperative connections formed by the parasite—Self-righteous millions stabbed with rage.
“That bitch—She brings the heat three dimensional.”
“The ugly cloud of smoke hung there solid female blighted continent—This turned out to be one of those association locks in Rome—I look down at the end—He quiets you, remember?—Finis. So I spit the planet from all the pictures and give him a place of residence with inflexible authority—Well, no terms—A hand has been taken—Your name fading looks like—Madison Avenue machine disconnected.”
THE MAYAN CAPER
Joe Brundige brings you the shocking story of the Mayan Caper exclusive to The Evening News—
A Russian scientist has said: “We will travel not only in space but in time as well”—I have just returned from a thousand-year time trip and I am here to tell you what I saw—And to tell you how such time trips are made—It is a precise operation—It is difficult—It is dangerous—It is the new frontier and only the adventurous need apply—But it belongs to anyone who has the courage and know-how to enter—It belongs to you—
I started my trip in the morgue with old newspapers, folding in today with yesterday and typing out composites—When you skip through a newspaper as most of us do you see a great deal more than you know—In fact you see it all on a subliminal level—Now when I fold today’s paper in with yesterday’s paper and arrange the pictures to form a time section montage, I am literally moving back to the time when I read yesterday’s paper, that is traveling in time back to yesterday—I did this eight hours a day for three months—I went back as far as the papers went—I dug out old magazines and forgotten novels and letters—I made fold-ins and composites and I did the same with photos—
The next step was carried out in a film studio—I learned to talk and think backward on all levels—This was done by running film and sound track backward—For example a picture of myself eating a full meal was reversed, from satiety back to hunger—First the film was run at normal speed, then in slow-motion—T
he same procedure was extended to other physiological processes including orgasm—(It was explained to me that I must put aside all sexual prudery and reticence, that sex was perhaps the heaviest anchor holding one in present time.) For three months I worked with the studio—My basic training in time travel was completed and I was now ready to train specifically for the Mayan assignment—
I went to Mexico City and studied the Mayans with a team of archaeologists—The Mayans lived in what is now Yucatán, British Honduras, and Guatemala—I will not recapitulate what is known of their history, but some observations on the Mayan calendar are essential to understanding this report—
The Mayan calendar starts from a mythical date 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu and rolls on to the end of the world, also a definite date depicted on the codices as a God pouring water on the earth—The Mayans had a solar, a lunar, and a ceremonial calendar rolling along like interlocking wheels from 5 Ahua 8 Cumhu to the end—The absolute power of the priests, who formed about two percent of the population, depended on their control of this calendar—The extent of this number monopoly can be deduced from the fact that the Mayan verbal language contains no number above ten—Modern Mayan-speaking Indians use Spanish numerals—Mayan agriculture was of the slash and burn type—They had no plows. Plows can not be used in the Mayan area because there is a stratum of limestone six inches beneath the surface and the slash and burn method is used to this day—Now slash and burn agriculture is a matter of precise timing—The brush must be cut at a certain time so it will have time to dry and the burning operation carried out before the rains start—A few days’ miscalculation and the year’s crop is lost—
The Mayan writings have not been fully deciphered, but we know that most of the hieroglyphs refer to dates in the calendar, and these numerals have been translated—It is probable that the other undeciphered symbols refer to the ceremonial calendar—There are only three Mayan codices in existence, one in Dresden, one in Paris, one in Madrid, the others having been burned by Bishop Landa—Mayan is very much a living language and in the more remote villages nothing else is spoken—
More routine work—I studied Mayan and listened to it on the tape recorder and mixed Mayan in with English—I made innumerable photomontages of Mayan codices and artifacts—the next step was to find a “vessel”—We sifted through many candidates before settling on a young Mayan worker recently arrived from Yucatán—This boy was about twenty, almost black, with the sloping forehead and curved nose of the ancient Mayans—(The physical type has undergone little alteration)—He was illiterate—He had a history of epilepsy—He was what mediums call a “sensitive”—For another three months I worked with the boy on the tape recorder mixing his speech with mine—(I was quite fluent in Mayan at this point—Unlike Aztec it is an easy language.)
It was time now for “the transfer operation”—“I” was to be moved into the body of this young Mayan—The operation is illegal and few are competent to practice it—I was referred to an American doctor who had become a heavy metal addict and lost his certificate—“He is the best transfer artist in the industry” I was told “For a price.”
We found the doctor in a dingy office on the Avenida Cinco de Mayo—He was a thin grey man who flickered in and out of focus like an old film—I told him what I wanted and he looked at me from a remote distance without warmth or hostility or any emotion I had ever experienced in myself or seen in another—He nodded silently and ordered the Mayan boy to strip, and ran practiced fingers over his naked body—The doctor picked up a box-like instrument with electrical attachments and moved it slowly up and down the boy’s back from the base of the spine to the neck—The instrument clicked like a Geiger counter—The doctor sat down and explained to me that the operation was usually performed with “the hanging technique”—The patient’s neck is broken and during the orgasm that results he passes into the other body—This method, however, was obsolete and dangerous—For the operation to succeed you must work with a pure vessel who has not been subject to parasite invasion—Such subjects are almost impossible to find in present time he stated flatly—His cold grey eyes flicked across the young Mayan’s naked body:
“This subject is riddled with parasites—If I were to employ the barbarous method used by some of my learned colleagues—(nameless assholes)—you would be eaten body and soul by crab parasites—My technique is quite different—I operate with molds—Your body will remain here intact in deepfreeze—On your return, if you do return, you can have it back.” He looked pointedly at my stomach sagging from sedentary city life—“You could do with a stomach tuck, young man—But one thing at a time—The transfer operation will take some weeks—And I warn you it will be expensive.”
I told him that cost was no object—The News was behind me all the way—He nodded briefly: “Come back at this time tomorrow.”
When we returned to the doctor’s office he introduced me to a thin young man who had the doctor’s cool removed grey eyes—“This is my photographer—I will make my molds from his negatives.” The photographer told me his name was Jiménez—(“Just call me ‘Jimmy the Take’”)—We followed the “Take” to a studio in the same building, equipped with a 35 millimeter movie camera and Mayan backdrops—He posed us naked in erection and orgasm, cutting the images in together down the middle line of our bodies—Three times a week we went to the doctor’s office—He looked through rolls of film his eyes intense, cold, impersonal—And ran the clicking box up and down our spines—Then he injected a drug which he described as a variation of the apomorphine formula—The injection caused simultaneous vomiting and ejaculating in the Mayan vessel—The doctor told me these exercises were only the preliminaries and that the actual operation, despite all precautions and skills, was still dangerous enough.
At the end of three weeks he indicated the time had come to operate—He arranged us side by side naked on the operating table under floodlights—With a phosphorescent pencil he traced the middle line of our bodies from the cleft under the nose down to the rectum—Then he injected a blue fluid of heavy cold silence as word dust fell from demagnetized patterns—From a remote Polar distance I could see the doctor separate the two halves of our bodies and fit together a composite being—I came back in other flesh the lookout different, thoughts and memories of the young Mayan drifting through my brain—
The doctor gave me a bottle of the vomiting drug which he explained was efficacious in blocking out any control waves—He also gave me another drug which, if injected in to a subject, would enable me to occupy his body for a few hours and only at night. “Don’t let the sun come up on you or it’s curtains—zero eaten by crab—And now there is the matter of my fee.”
I handed him a briefcase of bank notes and he faded into the shadows furtive and seedy as an old junky.
The paper and the embassy had warned me that I would be on my own, a thousand years from any help—I had a vibrating camera gun sewed into my fly, a small tape recorder and a transistor radio concealed in a clay pot—I took a plane to Mérida where I set about contacting a “broker” who could put me in touch with a “time guide”—Most of these so-called brokers are old drunken frauds and my first contact was no exception—I had been warned to pay nothing until I was satisfied with the arrangements—I found this “broker” in a filthy hut on the outskirts surrounded by a rubbish heap of scrap iron, old bones, broken pottery and worked flints—I produced a bottle of aguardiente and the broker immediately threw down a plastic cup of the raw spirit and sat there swaying back and forth on a stool while I explained my business—He indicated that what I wanted was extremely difficult—Also dangerous and illegal—He could get into trouble—Besides I might be an informer from the Time Police—He would have to think about it—He drank two more cups of spirit and fell on the floor in a stupor—The following day I called again—He had thought it over and perhaps—In any case he would need a week to prepare his medicines and this he could only do if he were properly supplied with aguardiente—And he poured another
glass of spirits slopping full—Extremely dissatisfied with the way things were going I left—As I was walking back toward town a boy fell in beside me.
“Hello, Meester, you look for broker yes?—Muy no good one—Him,” he gestured back toward the hut. “No good borracho son bitch bastard—Take mucho dinero—No do nothing—You come with me, Meester.”
Thinking I could not do worse, I accompanied the boy to another hut built on stilts over a pond—A youngish man greeted us and listened silently while I explained what I wanted—The boy squatted on the floor rolling a marijuana cigarette—He passed it around and we all smoked—The broker said yes he could make the arrangements and named a price considerably lower than what I had been told to expect—how soon?—He looked at a shelf where I could see a number of elaborate hourglasses with sand in different colors: red, green, black, blue, and white—The glasses were marked with symbols—He explained to me that the sand represented color time and color words—He pointed to a symbol on the green glass. “Then—One hour—”
He took out some dried mushrooms and herbs and began cooking them in a clay pot—As green sand touched the symbol, he filled little clay cups and handed one to me and one to the boy—I drank the bitter medicine and almost immediately the pictures I had seen of Mayan artifacts and codices began moving in my brain like animated cartoons—A spermy, compost heap smell filled the room—The boy began to twitch and mutter and fell to the floor in a fit—I could see that he had an erection under his thin trousers—The broker opened the boy’s shirt and pulled off his pants—The penis flipped out spurting in orgasm after orgasm—A green light filled the room and burned through the boy’s flesh—Suddenly he sat up talking in Mayan—The words curled out of his mouth and hung visible in the air like vine tendrils—I felt a strange vertigo which I recognized as the motion sickness of time travel—The broker smiled and held out a hand—I passed over his fee—The boy was putting on his clothes—He beckoned me to follow and I got up and left the hut—
Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader Page 32
